Ultimate Guide To Folding@home

_JOHN_LENNON_:
1. Doing ANYTHING stresses the life of your processor, but this F@H (Folding @ Home) uses spare CPU cycles, so you dont notice it while your playing BF 1942, or while im playing Halo. But if say you leave your computer for a bit, it will notice the free processor, and pick up the slack.

2. It really doesnt hurt your computer like I said above, I konw people that have this running on no less than 20 machines and have been doing for awhile.

3. Yes, I said 20 MACHINES. People take this very seriously, as over at AMDMB.com.

4. I have been folding for over a year now for the AMDMB.com team, and I think were maybe 5th or 6th world wide. I know from our forums that we have several people like I said with the 20+ Computers running 24/7 just to fold for cancer. (yes the electric bill gets raised a few ticks) I know that also we have taken donation on 4 complete machines, and then given them to people to they can be Folding for the team in the privacy of their own homes. I think were currently taking donations for the 5th one.

5. You guys should all get into this, haha Bigdawg, being about my age I know your parents have asked you around the house at times (whats your computer doing on right now, when your not even infront of it.) Well, atleast now you could say Fighting Cancer Mom! Heh, no but serious guys, every computer can help, even if its just a few work units a month. And we all have Spare CPU Cycles to spare because none of us are maxing out our PC all day. Half the time I have my PC on im just tinkering with some and I have WMP on and Folding @ Home.

6. Now everyone go download the folding at home command Client
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OC TEAM:
What are the system requirements for folding?
You will need to have the equivalent of a 200MHz Pentium to be able to process the work in time. The time limits for turning in completed work vary depending on the size and complexity of the protein that you are given to work on. NOTE: in some cases users have gotten even slower computers than this to fold and get units on time. The slowest i have seen get units in on time is a P166 mhz. If you think it is too slow to fold, give it a chance, what's that worse that can happen.




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Originally posted by 4th gen@22 March 2004 - 16:17
I had to format my comp the other day so I lost that big juicy WU :(
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bummer. i dont think ive lost any WU so far anyway.

ive also just added another machine, a amd k6-2 500, with 256mb ram. running a little each day. running the genome@home, which is now just folding WU without a deadline, since its a slow machine, and not on alot.
 
Originally posted by bulio@4 March 2004 - 18:14
wonderful prog, I on it now with k-lite team. I think it is great and will try to 24/7 it as my grand pa has cancer :(
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:(

Sorry to hear that.
That's why we must do anything we can and find that cure...
 
Twice now since I've been using F@H, it's crashed taking hours of CPU time with it. The first time I lost about 71% of a work unit, due to a communications error with the server:

"[06:21:45] Completed 355000 out of 500000 steps (71)
[06:33:02] CoreStatus = 1 (1)
[06:33:02] Client-core communications error: ERROR 0x1
[06:33:02] Deleting current work unit & continuing...
[06:33:22] - Preparing to get new work unit...
[06:33:24] + Attempting to get work packet
[06:33:24] - Connecting to assignment server
[06:33:27] + Could not connect to Assignment Server
[06:33:27] + Could not connect to Assignment Server 2
[06:33:27] + Couldn't get work instructions.
[06:33:27] - Error: Attempt #1 to get work failed, and no other work to do.
Waiting before retry."

Which prompted me to stop using it. I retried it the other day, got one WU completed. My PC crashed again today, and no surprise, F@H lost its WU again:

"[16:33:30] Completed 480000 out of 500000 steps (96)"

:(
 
Originally posted by 4th gen@19 March 2004 - 07:56
Just got my first 2500 part WU. My other 4 up until now have been 500 parts, so this one is gonna take a long, long time...

Just out of interest, how long (on average) does it take you chaps to complete a 500 part WU, and what CPU have you got?
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thank you guyz the mods at this forum are GREAT! ;)

i guess i better start telling you about other stuff about FAH :D

btw my first sticky i feel like im going to cry :D

once again thank you :D
 
Originally posted by 4th gen@16 March 2004 - 17:22
Twice now since I've been using F@H, it's crashed taking hours of CPU time with it. The first time I lost about 71% of a work unit, due to a communications error with the server:

"[06:21:45] Completed 355000 out of 500000 steps (71)
[06:33:02] CoreStatus = 1 (1)
[06:33:02] Client-core communications error: ERROR 0x1
[06:33:02] Deleting current work unit & continuing...
[06:33:22] - Preparing to get new work unit...
[06:33:24] + Attempting to get work packet
[06:33:24] - Connecting to assignment server
[06:33:27] + Could not connect to Assignment Server
[06:33:27] + Could not connect to Assignment Server 2
[06:33:27] + Couldn't get work instructions.
[06:33:27] - Error: Attempt #1 to get work failed, and no other work to do.
Waiting before retry."

Which prompted me to stop using it. I retried it the other day, got one WU completed. My PC crashed again today, and no surprise, F@H lost its WU again:

"[16:33:30] Completed 480000 out of 500000 steps (96)"

:(
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The first bit (up to [06:33:02]) indicates some sort of file system error, not a communication error. Basically it could not write the results to the disk, presumably because it thought the file was corrupt. Rather than send bad results back to the source it deleted them.

The next part (up to [06:33:27]) is an attempt to get another WU. First of all it has to connect to an assignment server. This then routes the request to a Work Unit server, but as the error messages suggest it could not even connect to the assignment server.

Both of these events occuring together suggest you have some inherent instability in your system, which is causing the crash. I'm guessing that you are using FAT32 file system. When your system crashes with FAT32, the last part of the file will be lost (just like with Kazaa). So F@H thinks your results are corrupt and discards them (again, like Kazaa downloads).

Suggestions:
Convert to NTFS if you are using FAT32. It won't cure the crash but it may stop you from losing your work.
Sort out your system instability - I've found from experience that raising Vcore slightly (0.025V is usually enough) can cure this problem, even though the system is theoretically running at the correct settings. Watch your temps though.
 
Originally posted by summerlinda@25 January 2004 - 14:36
You have to take better care of that Protein of yours, nurture it, talk to it, feed it etc.
....
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Mmmmm, :frusty: always thought proteins were supposed to nurture ME :rolleyes:
 
I was looking over the team statistics, What I was wondering about is the pts. I see there is a page that you can goto to see what the worth of a package you are doing. How do you get these pts is it after you are done the package or every so offten? Im not really worried about the pts but it would be kool to see how I stack up against other ppl.

One last thing to ask, then I will stop asking so questions.

I was think about how to get my pc fold faster. I thought about running F@H in safemode, So I did. The #'s are hard to read and I only did this for a hour but it seemed to be a bit faster. Could anyone else see if this could work or not.
 
What is gromacs?

Gromacs is the new folding core (FAHcore_78.exe) GROMACS provides extremely high performance compared to all other programs. For some calculations, gromacs affords benefits over the current code in FAH (the current code is based on Jay Ponder's Tinker), especially a great speed increase (perhaps up to 10x-20x). This will substantially increase the power of FAH for many calculations.

some ppl say that it actually gives you more points as well...so its a WIn WIN! situation :D

Streaming SIMD(Single Instruction Multiple Data) Extensions

Processors & applications that do not use SSE process one data element in one instruction, a processing style called Single Instruction Single Data, or SISD. In contrast, processors having the SIMD capability have the ability to process more than one data element in one instruction. In other words the processor can work harder with the same two hands (if you get the metaphor). Using SSE requires support from the application, the operating system & the CPU.

Processors that have SSE are as follows..

Athlon XP
Duron 1 GHz & above (morgan core)
Pentium 4
Pentium 3
Celeron 566 mhz & above (coppermine & tualatin cores)

Processors that do not have SSE are as follows..

Duron 950 & below (spitfire core)
Athlon (K7, K75, & Thunderbird cores)
K6-3
K6-2
Celeron 533 MHz & below
Pentium 2
Pentium
All Via/Cyrix CPU's

Anything released before the processors listed of course does not have SSE.

Any version of Windows after '98 supports SSE (95' may just not sure). Any newer Linux distro should have support as well.

The Gromacs core also uses AMD
 
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